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DAWN OF THE DEAD
Rating: 
USA. 2004.
Director – Zack Snyder, Screenplay – James Gunn, Based on the Film Written by George A. Romero, Producers – Marc Abraham, Eric Newman & Richard P. Rubinstein, Photography – Matthew F. Leonetti, Music – Tyler Bates, Special Effects Supervisor – Laird McMurray, Makeup Effects Supervisor – David Leroy Anderson, Makeup Effects – AFX Studios, Production Design – Andrew Neskoromny. Production Company – Strike Entertainment/New Amsterdam Entertainment.
Cast:
Sarah Polley (Ana), Ving Rhames (Kenneth Hall), Jake Weber (Michael), Mekhi Phifer (Andre), Michael Kelly (C.J.), Kevin Zegers (Terry), Ty Burrell (Steve), Inna Korobkina (Luda), Michael Barry (Bart), Lindy Booth (Nicole), Matt Frewer (Frank), Jayne Eastwood (Norma), Boyd Banks (Tucker), Kim Poirier (Monica), R.D. Reid (Glenn), Bruce Bohne (Andy), Justin Louis (Luis), Hannah Lochner (Vivian)
Plot: Ana, a Milwaukee, Wisconsin, nurse, is abruptly woken one morning as a neighbouring girl Vivian comes into her and her husband Luis’s bedroom. Vivian then suddenly viciously bites into Luis’s neck, after which he gets back up equally violently crazed and attempts to attack Ana. Ana flees but sees that the whole city around her is in anarchy as people everywhere turn on and attack others, trying to devour their flesh. After crashing, she comes across a group of others and they take refuge inside the Crossroads Mall. The mall’s three security guards, led by the redneck C.J., only very reluctantly allow them in. As they barricade themselves in, hundreds of zombies gather outside the doors, trying to force their way in. Inside their survival is threatened by those among the group who become infected by zombie bites and conflict over their best means of survival.
Dawn of the Dead is a remake of George Romero’s cult classic zombie film Dawn of the Dead (1979). Dawn of the Dead 79 was actually the middle entry in a tetraology of zombie films that George Romero began with Night of the Living Dead (1968). Night revolutionized the horror film – it was the first independently made horror film to become a mass success, it broke down a huge number of taboo barriers and clichés with grim regard, it came loaded with looming metaphors of social collapse, as well as produced a great many imitators. Dawn of the Dead was equally successful, becoming a midnight cult classic, being groundbreaking in its gore effects and was also muchly imitated. Romero made a third entry, the greatly underrated Day of the Dead (1985), but this was not a particular success and he thereafter appeared to abandon attempts to make a fourth Dead film.
Nevertheless the popularity of the Dead films is something that would not go away. First there was Dan O’Bannon who made an independent sequel Return of the Living Dead (1985) out of a complicated legal settlement over Night, and this proved popular enough to produce two sequels. And then there was Romero’s remake of the original, Night of the Living Dead (1990), as directed by Tom Savini, his makeup effects man on the sequels. And then there were even unofficial remakes, such as the recent 28 Days Later (2002), which quite substantially borrowed much of the plot from Day of the Dead. The success of 28 Days Later saw a considerable revival of interest in Romero zombie films, which included the amusing British parody Shaun of the Dead (2004) and spinoffs like Day of the Dead 2: Contagium (2005) and yet more remakes with Night of the Living Dead 3D (2006) and Day of the Dead (2007). The renewed public attention finally gave Romero the profile once again to get financing for his fourth Dead film, Land of the Dead (2005) and then go onto the low-budget mockumentary Diary of the Dead (2007).
Dawn of the Dead 04 joins a whole host of recent films that have been remaking and/or substantially referencing 1970s independent horror films – the likes of the aforementioned 28 Days Later, Cabin Fever (2002), House of 1000 Corpses (2003), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake (2003) The Toolbox Murders (2003), Wrong Turn (2003), Assault on Precinct 13 (2005), The Fog (2005), Black Christmas (2006), The Hills Have Eyes (2006), The Omen (2006), Sisters (2006), When a Stranger Calls (2006), The Wicker Man (2006), Day of the Dead (2007), Halloween (2007), The Hitcher (2007), April Fool’s Day (2008), It’s Alive (2008), Prom Night (2008), Silent Night, Deadly Night (2008) and Friday the 13th (2009).
Director Zack Snyder certainly pays appropriately deferential homage to the original Dawn of the Dead. Most of the original cast make cameos – Ken Foree turns up as a preacher on the tv, Scott H. Reininger appears as a besieged general, and Tom Savini, the makeup effects man from the original who also played the biker leader, turns up as a sheriff (who would appear to be a close cousin to the Southern sheriff’s posse that appeared at the end of Night), and the mall’s clothing outlet chain is named after actress Gaylen Ross. While one cannot deny that the filmmakers here and in these abovementioned films are horror fans, whether any of these remakes are improvements over their originals is a highly debatable question. Indeed what these remakes tend to seem more than anything is simply unnecessary.
Dawn of the Dead 04 was called a ‘reimagining’ of the original, whatever that may mean. There’s certainly many points of difference between the two. With Dawn of the Dead 79, the gore was so extreme that George Romero had to release the film independently and unrated; Dawn of the Dead 04 by contrast comes backed by a major studio (Universal) and released with MPAA approval. On the plus side, the studio backing and MPAA approval hasn’t quite censored the gore as much as one expected that it would – there’s quite a degree of blood spilt, objects impaled through heads, heads and body parts severed (which may well say something positive about how the ground rules about acceptable levels of gore in mainstream cinema has shifted since 1979). On the other hand Dawn of the Dead 04 is not quite as memorably gory as the original – certainly it is a hard stretch of the imagination to think that audiences are going to go out of this version talking about the screwdriver in the ear scene, the helicopter blade in the head, the intestine devouring scene etc. There’s no similar such individual standout gore set-pieces here. Moreover almost all suggestion of the zombies devouring their victims has been eliminated – they never seem to be doing anything more than biting victims.
Certainly some aspects of the original have been improved. Whereas George Romero made his version on only a $2 million budget, cutting his costs by shooting in a Pittsburgh mall after shopping hours, this version has a $28 million budget and recognizable name actors. And certainly the bigger budget has allowed the remake to envision the social apocalypse on a much wider scale – the zombies outside the mall number in the thousands, there are CGI-added shots of the city burning.
More importantly the remake has quite substantially changed the basic plot of the original. It ups the complement of characters from four to fifteen, nearly four times the original number. Alas these are never very well characterized – they are just the standard crosscut of characters that inhabit survivalist dramas – the treacherously self-interested yuppie, the redneck, the tough but honourable heroic type, the elderly man, the father who must give up his life, the pregnant woman, the blonde bimbo. The remake also dispenses with the bikers that invade the mall, although takes the more interesting step of internalizing the conflict within the group – making it initially a fight between the group and three security guards led by the redneck Michael Kelly, who seems more interested in maintaining his own authority than considering practicality or group survival. The zombies are also much more mobile – they can run rather than blindly stumble about. (Zack Snyder says the reason for this was because he wanted to avoid the slapstick scenes that George Romero puts his zombies through in the original).
What is also noticeable is that Dawn of the Dead 04 dispenses entirely with the satire of the original. Romero’s films of the 1970s always had a startling level of social commentary to them. Dawn of the Dead 79 was a remarkable little parable about materialism and the consumer society – how the mall became a materialist idyll for the survivors, with the zombies rather amusingly seen as mindless consumers operating by basic instinct. All of that has been excised by the time of the remake, which is now only really a survivalist action/gore film with no intended level of social metaphor. Indeed when Dawn of the Dead 04 does the whole thing about the survivors running about the mall and enjoying the mini-utopia, all it does is throw up a montage of cute scenes – people riding about on bikes, watching dvds, shooting basketball hoops in the main concourse, getting their hair done, having sex on a walking machine – and without any trace of irony. When George Romero conducted such a montage he was ironically reflecting on the meaningless of mall culture – people taking money when there is nowhere left to spend it, threading their way through empty bank queues. The irony of Zack Synder’s montage is that such scenes unintentionally buy into the very utopian image of the consumer society that George Romero was trying to satirize. There are other times that the remake tries to throw in original ideas – particularly the zombie baby – that promptly go nowhere – the film quickly kills it off and squanders any interesting concepts the idea may have raised.
There are occasional moments to Dawn of the Dead 04 – Zack Snyder does improvise an amusing series of exchanges between the group and the man trapped on the roof of the gunstore; and there’s quite a decent opening where Sarah Polley’s husband is abruptly bitten by the zombie girl and she must flee, her flight gradually taking in an awareness of the apocalypse as the camera pulls back to an aerial shot crossing the burning city, showing vehicles appearing and colliding. And Zack Snyder certainly builds the film up to a reasonably intensive all-out climax in the last 15 minutes as the group make their break out of the mall and away to safety. But compared to the memorable to-the-death survivalist battle that George Romero’s survivors engaged in, the scenes here seem a little lacking. While there’s a moderate intensity, there’s never anything that has you on the edge of the seat in gripped suspense. In the end Dawn of the Dead 04 emerges as a remake that revisits the original but does so without having anything to add or even anything to say about it all.
Director Zack Snyder next went onto make the hit big screen adaptation of 300 (2007), based on Frank Miller’s graphic novel about the Greek wars, and is planning an adaptation of Alan Moore’s classic graphic novel Watchmen (2008). Screenwriter James Gunn had previously written Troma’s Tromeo & Juliet (1996), Scooby-Doo (2002) and Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed (2004) and made his directorial debut with the horror homage Slither (2006).
(Nominee for Best Makeup Effects at this site’s Best of 2004 Awards).
Copyright Richard Scheib 2004
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